


Marigolds In Avalon

by flannelgiraffe



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: And I'm Not Talking About Harry, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Original Character Death(s), Possible Alternate Universes, Post-Canon, Post-Kingsman: The Secret Service, Really I'm Just Being Horrible To Everyone In This Movie, What-If, possible futures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 04:30:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19899871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flannelgiraffe/pseuds/flannelgiraffe
Summary: The word is saved, and Eggsy Unwin is about to get the happy end he so well deserves. The future is full of possibilities. Well, maybe even too full of them...





	Marigolds In Avalon

**Author's Note:**

> My sincerest thanks to  ThisAintBC for betaing, for the title, and for being awesome.

This is how it ends.

After the world is saved, Eggsy is taken into the folds of the Kingsman organization. They settle his family into a house in a good neighbourhood and settle him into the now vacant title of Galahad. Eggsy grieves loudly, argues against his new codename quite vehemently, threatens to break Merlin's nose, but eventually, he bows to the inevitable. He is sent on a series of training missions, together with Lancelot. To absolutely nobody’s surprise, it turns out that the two of them are frighteningly compatible. They breeze through missions with a level of efficiency that leaves the older agents slightly baffled. Well. Almost all of them, except, of course, Percival - who knew full well he had chosen well with Roxy - and Merlin - because he had seen enough in Switzerland. 

Years pass. Eggsy Unwin leads a comfortable - if double - life. He does everything as it is proper, for a gentleman is, above all, always proper. Harry Hart taught him that, and Eggsy never forgets the lesson. He is proper in his dress, his manners, his habits and even his speech. He gets up every morning, dresses, walks his dog, kisses his mother and sister goodbye and whistles as he steps out the door. The neighbours are quickly taken with the polite young man, always in an impeccable suit, who always greets them with a smile and who, upon inquiry, tells them he works on Saville Row. 

Eggsy prefers keeping things simple. He prefers taking the underground to the shop over getting a cab - a habit both Merlin and Roxy despair of - and when he is between missions, he still enjoys going out for a pint with his old friends who tease him mercilessly about his posh new habits. Eggsy always smiles good-naturedly at their remarks. 

He spends a lot of time with Roxy when neither of them have any missions: they are the best of friends. He has other friends amongst the Knights – Kay and Gaheris and Lamorak, and most of all Merlin, whom he comes to respect above all others. 

Twice in a year - on All Saints Day and on Lee Unwin's birthday - Eggsy dons his best pinstripe suit and his most solemn tie, packs his family into a cab and takes them to visit his father's grave. On Remembrance Day, he goes alone to lay a poppy among the thousand others at the base of the Cenotaph, for Harry. 

He trains and goes on missions: lots of missions, many times with Lancelot. Most of the time the missions are successful; sometimes, they are not. When they are not, Eggsy dutifully goes over the videos with Merlin, breaking down every move, every tiny detail so the next time he can do better. Afterwards he dutifully goes out and gets drunk, then sneaks into his home at the break of dawn, careful not to wake his mother. 

He never marries and never forms lasting attachments outside his family and Kingsman. It’s not out of some kind of noble determination not to cause someone pain with his sudden death, but rather out of practicality. Eggsy has no idea how his father planned to do it, balancing the job and family, but he is quite sure he could never manage it. There is always someone to spend the occasional fun night with, who won’t mind parting the next morning, and Eggsy never treats them less than respectfully. When a couple of years into their career at Kingsman Roxy suggests an entirely reasonable and mutually satisfactory friends with benefits arrangement, Eggsy takes her up on it rather cheerfully. It has nothing to do with romance, but it works beautifully for quite a few years, and in the end they come out of it as even better friends than before.

Even more years pass and Gary Unwin becomes a respectable gentleman in his fifties, still polite and soft-spoken to his neighbours, still lethal in the field and still a solid pillar of strength for his mother and his sister. Daisy is married now, her husband a dentist who likes Doctor Who and who argues good-naturedly about football with his brother-in-law over the dinner table. They have two kids who adore their Uncle Gary, and he spoils them absolutely rotten. 

He dies at the age of fifty-four, at the infirmary of the Kingsman headquarters after a successfully completed mission - the world safe, his conscience clear and his family secure. He has no regrets. 

\---  
This is how it ends. 

After the world is saved, Eggsy is taken into the folds of the Kingsman organization. They mourn Arthur, who turned against them, they mourn the Knights felled by his treachery and they mourn Harry and the others who died because of him and Valentine. Then they start rebuilding. Percival, Bors, Tristan, Lancelot, Eggsy - now Galahad - and the other remaining handful of Knights are run ragged on missions for the next eighteen months, guided and coaxed and watched over by Merlin, who basically lives at the headquarters for an entire year. They struggle, but slowly they start to climb back from the edge. They even have recruits again – one batch, then a second, and they are planning to have even more.

Then everything goes to hell again. 

They never learn where the new threat comes from. It could be something Valentine prepared to be set in motion later, it could be a new wannabe villain, or even a rival agency. Hell, it could even be their own government, turning against them. It doesn't matter. They fall, one after the other. 

Lancelot falls to her death from the roof of a building, having overcome her fear of heights in vain. She dies due to treason, pushed by a member of her own security detail. Merlin watches the ground rushing up to meet her through her glasses and screams with her at the impact.

Galahad bleeds to death in a dirty little alley, the air thick with the smell of cat piss and rotting garbage. He dies because of treason, too, led to his death by fake information carefully planted into Kingsman's supposedly secure systems, and Merlin has never been so glad that Harry Hart is dead, because he cannot imagine facing him after this. Galahad's glasses are knocked off his face, so Merlin only sees a row of bricks and says nothing, listening to the laboured breathing at the other end of the feed as it slows, then stops completely.

Merlin is the last one to fall. He dies among the remains of the Kingsman headquarters where he traps himself, his pursuers and all the secrets of the long history of Kingsman. His hand never shakes as he reaches for the self-destruct button. In a way, he dies because of treason, too; but by then, there is no one left to care.  
\---  
This is how it ends. Eggsy is taken into Kingsman, sent on a series of training missions and is shot to death on the second, not noticing an attacker creeping up behind him while he is fighting three others. It is not really anyone’s fault – just a thing that happens.

\---  
This is how it ends. Eggsy is never taken into Kingsman, the hurriedly gathered Table deciding to stick to the rules and refusing him on the basis of him not completing the final task of the recruit course. They are rather nervous about him poisoning Arthur, too, even if he was a traitor. They offer him an analyst position. Ever the pragmatic young man, Eggsy accepts: he has a family to take care of, after all. 

He is ambushed and beaten to death by Dean’s goons behind the Black Swan a week before he could start at his new job. Turns out they are very good at holding grudges.

\---  
This is how it ends. Eggsy is offered the seat of Galahad. He refuses. He lives long enough to regret it.

**Author's Note:**

> When I wrote this short fic, immediately after watching the movie in 2015, mostly fix-it fics were being posted in the fandom. Since this is basically the polar opposite of a fix-it, I had no heart to post it. My concept was mostly "let's give Eggsy a happy end that is totally unsatisfying, then make the reader regret thinking that is the worst". Did it work?


End file.
